A new localized channel sharing scheme for cellular networks

Enhancing system capacity while maintaining quality of service is an important issue in wireless cellular networks. In this paper, we present a new localized channel sharing scheme to address this problem. Our basic idea is to allow channels to be shared between adjacent cells. We further propose a fixed channel assignment scheme to maximize channel reuse efficiency while allowing channel sharing. We show that our sharing scheme can also facilitate handoff processing. An important feature of our sharing scheme is that channel management is localized between adjacent cells, and no global coordination or optimization is required, thus making it suitable for implementation. We provide simulation results comparing our scheme with the conventional channel assignment and handoff techniques. We find that our scheme improves system capacity over a broad range of traffic parameters and a variety of quality of service requirements.